[Andrew Szilvasy]

John,

Yes, I've very much enjoyed a number of the pieces you've mentioned here--and obviously I shouldn't have neglected Swift, or even Samuel Johnson, with whom I am familiar. We'll see if this vein takes me back to Byron's Don Juan, which I really loved years ago. But I most appreciate about this post William Combe's Tours of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, a text I had never heard of at all, which is sad since both my undergraduate and graduate work skewed heavily towards British Romanticism. I've downloaded myself a copy, and am looking forward to working through it.

As for Americans, I'm similarly stymied on verse satire. Twain is obviously great and all, but I'm less interested in prose at the moment. With Italians, I've found a translation (but an old one) of Ariosto. I've got some work in translation by Nicolas Boileau (Art of Poetry / Lutrin) in my cart, and I can't really find a translation of Mathurin Régnier's Les Satyres, so I'm wondering if that could be a translation project. Any other important poets in the French tradition? Italian? German? Spanish? The only traditions I have any sense of literary history are Classic Greek, Latin, English, and French...and even the French is mostly Romanticism to today.